In an era when newspapers referred to most women by their husbands’ surnames, the name “Madam Julie Rosewald” leapt off our pages. That’s how this publication always referred to Rosewald, now widely recognized as the first woman cantor for her years of service at Congregation Emanu-El in San Francisco. She was married to a renowned composer and musician, but her prominence in the community as “the Cantor Soprano” meant that even in the 19th century, she was a woman of her own name.
Rosewald was born Julie Eichberg in 1847 in Stuttgart, Germany, the daughter of a prominent synagogue cantor. According to a 1906 Jewish Encyclopedia article written by none other than Henrietta Szold, Rosewald attended the Stuttgart Conservatorium, before moving to Baltimore and marrying violinist and conductor Jacob Rosewald. She sang across Europe with a touring opera company, before moving to another opera company that employed both her and her husband.
In 1884, the Rosewalds settled in San Francisco, where she “became a popular teacher of singing, her success in preparing pupils for church choirs, the concert hall and the operatic stage being largely due to her thorough knowledge of the anatomy and physiology of the throat,” the Jewish Encyclopedia tells us.
She began working at Emanu-El as lead soprano in the synagogue’s professional choir. But as the daughter of a leading German cantor, she had more to offer than singing her part. Almost immediately, she was thrust into the spotlight. Cantor Max Wolff died unexpectedly, and Emanu-El needed somebody to lead High Holidays services, writes the Jewish Museum of the American West. Rosewald turned out to be just the person.
Her leadership of those High Holidays services turned out to be a hit. “The singing was a feature of the service, Mrs. Rosewald at the Temple Emanu-El filling her arduous position with great credit,” wrote The Jewish Progress.
Until 1893, Rosewald served, essentially, as cantor of Emanu-El.
“During all these years Madam Rosewald, often lovingly called the ‘Cantor Soprano,’ made her services a source of the greatest delight to all of her hearers,” read her 1906 obituary in our pages by Jacob Voorsanger, Emanu-El rabbi and founder of this paper.
“She combined the highest degree of musical ability with a pious disposition and a fair understanding of Hebrew, having been trained in the school of her late father who was Cantor at Stuttgart, Germany,” Voorsanger wrote. “It was this remarkable combination that made the services of the Temple in her time attractive in the highest degree and gave pleasure as well as edification to the numerous attendants.”
It’s unclear whether people thought of her as a true cantor at the time, or what they made of her position, which remained officially “leading soprano.” But she led the cantorial parts of the service and worked with her husband and the synagogue organist to choose and arrange music for the congregation. Voorsanger, ever eager to prove the forward-thinking nature of the Jews of the West, wrote in Rosewald’s glowing obituary that “her position… was exceedingly unique.”
By 1926, 20 years after Rosewald died, we were referring to her straightforwardly as a cantor. “The first woman cantor was Mrs. Julie Rosewald, wife of the musician and composer, and herself a singer of note and remarkable gifts,” we wrote in an article about “women’s work” in Emanu-El’s early years. “She appreciated the needs of the service and greatly delighted the congregation with her musical numbers. Through her singing, she won the hearts and admiration of the entire congregation.”
Rosewald appeared in our pages often, frequently in small notes in the social column, where readers posted notices about when they would be out of town, when their visiting in-laws would be receiving guests, the date of an upcoming bar mitzvah, and so forth.
“Madam Julie Rosewald of San Francisco, accompanied by D. Oppenheimer, wife of Ernest H. Oppenheimer of Baltimore, Md., have gone to Del Monte after a week’s visit to San Jose,” one typical notice reads.
After she left Emanu-El, Rosewald became a professor of singing at Mills College in Oakland and continued to be a prominent member of the community. She died in 1906 at age 56 during a visit to Germany. Her will, which we reported on in great detail, left money to Emanu-El and Mills College and established the Rosewald Memorial Fund to help disadvantaged students at UC Berkeley.